Built To Last: The Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota

(woman) The Civilian Conservation Corps helped build the nation.

They had a job, they were learning new skills, they were supporting their family.

(2nd woman) You walk into those buildings and you just get that feel of the history of the park, and those big blocky structures and the big log beams.

You really kinda feel like you're transporting back in time a little bit.

[bass, guitar, & fiddle play in bright rhythm] (woman) "Built to Last, the Legacy of the CCC in Minnesota" is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, (male narrator) Throughout Minnesota's state parks and forests, travelers still enjoy the legacy of the New Deal's most popular program--the CCC.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was born from the desperate need of a country in the grips of the Great Depression.

(Franklin Delano Roosevelt) And I am certain that on this day, my fellow Americans, expect that on my induction into the presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision, with the present situation of our people in peril.

The CCC was a very early work relief program.

It was designed to employ young men, 18 to 25.

These men had to be eligible for relief, which means they had to be very, very poor.

The statistics themselves are a little bit frightening.

Unemployment generally across the board was at about 25%.

Think about 1 in 4 people being unemployed.

One-half of young men ages 18 to 25 were unemployed, so we had 50% unemployment in that age range.

And in places like the Iron Range, we were running 80% unemployment.

People today talk about hard times and they describe the Depression, and I always think that's an understatement.

It must have been absolutely frighteningly awful.

(narrator) Just 5 days after taking office in 1933, President Roosevelt introduced a bill proposing the first of his New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps.

(Barbara W. Sommer) The bill was brought to Congress, Congress passed it on voice vote unanimously.

On March 31st it was signed into law-- 3 weeks!

They were paid $30 a month, $25 was sent home, they did not see that, and that translates to somewhere around $500, $550 in today's money, so it was a substantial amount of income for these families, probably the only money they got.

(narrator) Roosevelt had set a nationwide goal of enrolling 250,000 young men by July 1st.

In Minnesota, their quota was met far ahead of schedule.

Itasca State Park was one of the first forest camps in Minnesota to receive a company of Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees, much to the surprise of everyone involved.

State foresters were all of a sudden told, like within 7 days, you were going to have a company of 200 men and the states weren't ready.

They very quickly had to move at finding a location for a camp, they had to find supplies to build the camp, and at first it was quite challenging.

When the CCC first came to Itasca State Park, one of the very first projects they began is actually the Old Timers Cabin.

This cabin actually became more of a record of the work that the CCC did, because in 1933 that was the hardest years of the Depression, people didn't have money and the president had to justify spending billions of dollars to pay for this program.

And so this cabin project was intensely documented.

There's a whole series of photographs, every week a report was sent to Washington, D.C.

to show and record that these young men were learning skills to help them in the future, but also that what they were developing and constructing was benefiting the people of this country.

(narrator) Rather than create a CCC bureaucracy, Roosevelt assigned management of day-to-day life at the camps to the Army.

The preserved buildings at Camp Rabideau National Historic Landmark near Blackduck, Minnesota, show the Army's influence on life in the CCC.

From 5: 00 in the morning till 10:00 at night they were pretty well kept busy all the time, cut down on some of the shenanigans.

Typical day started about 5: 00 in the morning.

They'd get up, they'd have an hour to make their bunks and straighten out their belongings.

They'd go to breakfast at the mess hall.

After breakfast they'd come down to where our flag is over here, and they'd have an assembly, and they'd get their assignments for the day.

They'd get in the trucks, they'd go out to work in the field.

At lunch time they usually sent a field kitchen out and they had lunch in the field.

They'd knock off about 4:00 in the afternoon, they'd come back to camp, they'd have an hour to shower and change and get ready for supper.

After supper is when we had our classes and classes would run from 6:30 to about 9.

And from 9 to 10 it was free time.

If they didn't have a class, and they could go to town if it was a Friday night, and they wanted to go to a dance, they could play pool in the recreation hall and 10:00 was lights out.

They were working hard and they were playing hard.

Education in the CCC was as important as putting these young men to work.

So when they came to camp, if they didn't have a high school diploma, they could earn their GED here at camp.

Once they had their high school diploma or a GED, we had, at this particular camp, 25 different professions they could learn here.

We had a blacksmith shop, they could learn to be a blacksmith or a farrier.

We have a hospital; they could learn to be what at that time was called a corpsman, today it'd be called a paramedic.

At the mess hall they could learn to be a commercial cook or commercial baker.

We always had construction going on, so they could learn carpentry, plumbing, electrical, forestry, surveying, road construction, truck driving, all these professions were taught here at camp.

Some of them were taught by the army, some taught by the forest service, but the majority of them were taught by men from the communities that we were in, that were usually too old to get into the CCC program, but they were educated in a profession and they weren't working.

So we hired them to come to camp and teach their profession to our enrollees on an apprenticeship basis.

[muted trumpet & piano play Depression era jazz] (narrator) Nowhere in Minnesota will you find a more beautiful testament to the partnership of local experienced men and CCC boys than in the beautiful masonry work at Gooseberry Falls State Park.

A lot of these boys that came, they were farm boys or town boys and they didn't know the skills of masonry and logging, and carpentry, putting things together.

And so having these kind of role models to teach them hands-on skills was really important, and there's even a quote from one of our enrollees who said, "Without these men, we would have been completely lost."

We have over 80 structures here at Gooseberry, and one of the biggest structures that we did was what we call the Castle in the Park.

And that's where, when visitors came, they could park at the top of that, come down to view the falls and there are restrooms there.

It was the longest-running project that they did.

We have a couple neat pictures, where you see 5 guys lifting this rock up and putting it in place.

Everything was done by hand.

You look at some of these buildings, and it's like they put together a puzzle.

With the Combination Building, it's now our camp shelter, you can look at different parts, and they have made little mushroom shapes out of the stone or little flowers.

So they got quite talented at the end.

They were just a bunch of hardworking boys out here.

They had a lotta fun.

They had lots of different teams and activities.

They had a sawyer competition, they had boxing, they would do noncompetitive sports, like bobsledding and playing games in the snow.

They had two newspapers and this was completely illustrated, written, and read by the CCC boys here, and just paging through it, you get a sense of who these people were.

You can read their names and stories about different activities that they were doing.

The newspaper's a really neat piece of history.

What was it like here?

What were they doing and how was it working in December by the lake?

Well, they'd write in there that they wished they had more socks!

(narrator) Native Americans were especially hard hit by the Depression.

Unemployment reached devastating levels, more than 90% on some reservations in Minnesota.

(narrator) Because many tribal members did not qualify for the CCC program, a separate division was established to create employment opportunities on reservations.

(man) Well, the Indian Division was kind of a parallel group to the CCC, and they were operated a little bit differently.

Where the army ran a lot of the camps for the CCC, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ran the camps for the Indian Division.

They worked a little bit differently, but many of the tasks they performed were the same kinds of tasks.

Many of the Indian Division CCC camps were located near reservations or on reservations, so a lot of the focus of their work was for the reservations.

In this neck of the woods, they're probably best known for planting trees.

The forests had been largely cut over by loggers in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the stump fields were not producing timber, they weren't suitable in the North Woods as farmland, and they were also a big fire hazard because of all the slash and things on the ground.

(narrator) Restoring Minnesota's forests meant the Indian Division and other CCC companies had to start from the ground up.

In the early '30s, they established 2 nurseries in Cass Lake.

And these nurseries were developed, of course, with the CCC labor.

There was a number of steps to the process.

Of course, you have to collect cones, go through the process of extracting the seeds, plant those at the nurseries, and when they were a year or two old, those would be sent out and transplanted into the forest areas.

And they produced millions and millions of seedlings.

Once you plant the trees, you want to take care of them, of course, and through the 1930s, remember that was the Dust Bowl Era and the forest was very dry and so they did have quite a few more fires than we have nowadays, and so that was part of the job, with the CCC was to get out there and fight those fires when necessary.

Gotta take care of those trees.

We have all our fire trucks and stuff like that today, and of course, they didn't have that luxury.

It was quite arduous getting in there.

First you had to hike in there because chances are, there's not gonna be a lot of roads around.

You have to take some personal supplies with you, food and water and stuff like that, to subsist on while you're fighting that fire.

And you had to carry all your equipment, including the water on your back.

They had huge tanks that they would wear and of course, then all of your hand tools as well.

This national forest is their legacy.

They built the entire forest, they acquired the land, they planted the trees, they built the roads to get where you needed to go, they built the ranger stations to manage the forest-- they just did everything here.

(narrator) Before the CCC, Minnesota state parks were more a concept than a reality.

The twin Interstate Parks on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin had been created to protect its unique geology, not to create a tourist destination.

Services for visitors were almost nonexistent.

(Julie Fox) Some of those old photos show us that the park roads were almost impassable.

If they wanted to hike here, they would be hiking on deer paths.

If they wanted to picnic here, they might find a downed log to sit and eat their picnic.

It was the Civilian Conservation Corps and the men of Camp Interstate that developed Interstate Park.

(Jennifer Webster) They created some of the first shelters that we have here.

So they created things that our visitors still use today, such as drinking fountains, shelters in our picnic area, the building that now serves as our Visitor Center.

And so they were creating facilities for the numerous state park visitors that were coming at that time period that had previously not existed in the parks.

They had a large impact in upgrading the services that were able to be offered here.

(Julie Fox) Of course, people coming to Interstate Park want to hike overlooking the Dalles of the St.

Croix River, they want to go into those high, rocky, remote areas.

And so to provide a safe experience for them, these men had to do a lot of work by hand.

They were supposed to make the park accessible without harming any of the natural scenery.

So they didn't use bobcats and backhoes and large dump trucks and things when constructing these trails.

They did the work by hand.

They learned from some of the Native American method of removing this rock.

They would start a fire on the rock, they would keep that fire burning for perhaps 24 or 48 hours.

Once that rock was good and hot, they got a bucket brigade of men.

They would actually pass buckets of cold water from either our Lake of Dalles here in the park or from the St.

Croix River.

They would dash it on the hot rock, it would shatter the rock enough so that they could pry it apart, using crowbars and other hand tools.

They would remove that rock from the path and then in areas where erosion might be a problem or safety might be a concern, they would place stone stairs.

They would set those stone stairs in place using block and tackle and I'm told some of these stone stairs weighed up to 2 tons.

So a tremendous amount of work that we're still enjoying today.

(narrator) The Minnesota Central Design Office in St.

Paul followed the lead of the National Park Service in designing buildings that enhanced each park's natural setting.

Each park had buildings that were designed then to the landscape and to the area specifically.

In an area where there's a lot of limestone, you see limestone buildings.

The granites up in the North Shore, if the park were located in a forest area, you'd see a lotta log buildings.

But buildings were designed to the site and to the park and to the location.

[piano plays softly] (narrator) One of the most unusual designs is at Flandrau State Park in New Ulm, Minnesota.

The style of the buildings that were built were this German, Old World architecture, and the reason was is because, of course, New Ulm had been settled by Germans.

You have these really high ceilings.

When you look at those dormers, it just gives you that totally different view or feel to the architecture than what you would have seen in other state parks, especially in Minnesota.

The interesting thing about Flandrau State Park is that it was 1 of 3 state parks in Minnesota that had a CCC and a WPA crew working at it.

And then we all had the Veterans Conservation Corps, the VCC.

We don't ever really hear about 'em.

When Franklin Roosevelt was looking to put men back to work, really his one fear was the bonus army, veterans from World War I that had descended on Washington, D.C.

and what they were looking for was this bonus that had been offered for them for their service in World War I. A lot of these men were hungry, they were without homes, they really had nothing.

And so they actually descended on Washington, D.C.

President Hoover had decided that he needed to get rid of them, and he actually sent the U.S.

Army in there, and it was a disaster.

It's probably one of the reasons President Hoover wasn't re-elected, and I think Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors understood that one of the important things was was putting these veterans back to work.

Here in Minnesota, they played a really significant role.

Because they were veterans, a lot of them had the craftsmanship and they probably had the ability to do more than what these young men in the CCC could do.

(narrator) The CCC didn't just build buildings.

Scenic State Park has one of the most distinctive collections of decorative arts in Minnesota.

[acoustic guitar; softly finger-picking] (Steve Railson) In addition to the work with logs and stone, they obviously had some talented metalworkers also that did some pretty cool things with iron for handles and hinges and things.

This building right near us, that's our historic lodge building, the furniture built by the CCC group.

There's some taxidermy displays, some art displays from the CCC days.

In the building you'll see a very nice set of 3 large paintings.

The paintings are nice, and I'm glad they did it here, because it's really a nice feature of the park.

(narrator) To Minnesotans, the ruggedly graceful CCC buildings are a state treasure, so much so that the state's entire inventory of CCC structures are on the National Register of Historic Places.

(Barbara W. Sommer) There's such pride in them.

If you look at the hinges on the doors, that was from the camp blacksmith.

You look at some of the lights, they're still there, or a fireplace, there's quite a bit of really detailed work, very, very high-quality work that they did.

(narrator) But high-quality work isn't always enough to stand up to the forces of nature.

[banjo plays] Nowhere has a CCC project faced tougher hurdles than at Jay Cooke State Park on the rocky bluffs of the St.

Louis River.

(Kristine Hiller) The very first project that they tackled was building the Swinging Bridge.

The very first Swinging Bridge in the park was built in 1924, and that was just rope and logs that were strewn across the rocks to the other side of the St.

Louis.

Then in 1934, when the boys were here, they built us the permanent Swinging Bridge that we have out there today.

So they're the ones that built the rock columns and established something that would hopefully last a little bit longer.

Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case.

They had to rebuild the Swinging Bridge in 1940 after some flood damage, and then it was damaged again in 1950-- 1950 is now the second-largest flood on record for the St.

Louis River, and that catastrophically damaged the Swinging Bridge.

So they raised it, they rebuilt it, thought that would work, it lasted for almost 60 years, and then of course, we had the floods of 2012, which are now the highest record level for the river and that wiped out the Swinging Bridge once again.

So we rebuilt it and reopened it in 2013.

So the bridge we have out there today is actually Swinging Bridge number 5.

The Swinging Bridge, as well as all of our other CCC structures are on the National Historic Register, so we are simply required to rebuild the bridge to reflect the original design.

So we went back and we looked at photographs that we have, we looked at all the blueprints that we have, and then came up with a design that would honor the original design from 1934 and yet still be a nice strong bridge for today.

We used rock masons that work on historic structures, so as they rebuilt pillars and repaired the rock, they quarried the rock right here from the park just like the CCC boys did, and they tried to match the original design, and some of it was, these are 16, 17-year-old boys doing the work, they're not very experienced, and so you saw that in their construction.

Now we have more experienced rock masons doing the work.

They commented, this isn't how we would do it today, but they tried to reflect what the CCC boys did.

People were very concerned when we did the rehab here.

Is it going to look like it used to?

You're not just going to build a modern thing.

So for people's experience that are coming to our parks, I think it's very important to them and so it's important to us as well to maintain that as well as to continue providing that experience.

(narrator) While evidence of the CCC is still visible across the state in Minnesota parks and forests, it's most profound impact was on the 77,224 young Minnesotans who served in the CCC.

(Barbara W. Sommer) It was a program that was really needed and it touched a lot of lives.

There are statistics that generally enrollees gained 10 pounds and grew 3 inches or 4 inches, that 40,000 nationally learned to read.

It opened doors for them to learn trades and skills and it basically gave them, as many of them said, a new chance on life.

I had the fortune of visiting with some former CCC boys.

When I talked to Harry Sperling, who has now passed away, I said Harry, was the CCC really meaningful to you, and he said, "Yes it was, and if they had that program back again, I'd sign up again even though I'm in my 80s."

Every CCC boy that I've ever met, they come in with a smile on their face, and they look around and they're like, I helped build this park!

And they're so excited about it!

I can tell, even before they tell me they're a CCC boy, because of that grin on their face.

Yes, they built our trails, they built a lot of these historic buildings we have, but for me their legacy they left behind is their commitment, not only to the camps they were in and to the service to their country, the Civilian Conservation Corps, but to each other and to the work they were doing as well.

So when we walk into these structures, we look around, we say gosh this is a beautiful log and stone structure, I can't believe it was built all those years ago, but actually take a second and think about the hands that lifted those rocks in places and the jokes that were made between buddies building it.

I think that's really their legacy, the sense of community that they left behind.

[guitars & bass play in bright folk rhythm] (Elisa Korenne) We can take it Send local boys across the lands We can take it Give us swamps and forests to reclaim We can take it Cut new trails and firebreaks We can take it Fight forest fires with whatever it takes We can take it Build towns bridges and miles of road We can take it Earn 5 dollars send 25 home Willing to live in houses At the college of colossal calluses Three and a half million men Reclaim the plains and groom the land Roosevelt's tree army did more than plant 3 billion trees We restocked a billion fish to streams Controlled mosquitoes and disease Drained a quarter million acres of swamp Plus 28,000 trails to tromp Built 100,000 miles of road Strung just as much line for the telephone Campgrounds building 800 state parks Carry the CCC... (woman) "Built to Last, the Legacy of the CCC in Minnesota" is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, To order a copy of this program, called 1-800-359-6900 or visit our online store at prairiepublic.org.